school effectiveness is measured solely by test scores on multiple choice tests, and not on whether students are deeply connecting with teachers or whether they are developing deeper understanding, a sense of nuance, a respect for multiple perspectives, a creativity that finds and then assesses many possible right answers.

how can we reconcile this January 2010 New Yorker Brooks with that December 2008 New York Time Brooks?

As bandwidth improves, a number of startups are offering web-based live training.

How do you make education affordable?

but much more innovation is needed.

This is probably the hardest part of the process

that we are not starting from scratch.

What this isn't is a short cut.

It's hard, and it's sometimes embarrassing.

by neglecting the ingredients of genuine motivation -- autonomy, mastery, and purpose -- they limit what each of us can achieve

Knowledge is not something we can package neatly in a sentence and pass along as though it were a finished product. It is complicated, distributed, mixed with other concepts, looks differently to different people, is inexpressible, tacit, mutually understood but never articulated.

It's usually impossible to get "better" data, and you have no alternative but to work with the data at hand

The most meaningful definition I've heard: "big data" is when the size of the data itself becomes part of the problem

Precision has an allure, but in most data-driven applications outside of finance, that allure is deceptive. Most data analysis is comparative:

Storing data is only part of building a data platform, though. Data is only useful if you can do something with it, and enormous datasets present computational problems

Hadoop has been instrumental in enabling "agile" data analysis. In software development, "agile practices" are associated with faster product cycles, closer interaction between developers and consumers, and testing

Faster computations make it easier to test different assumptions, different datasets, and different algorithms

It's easer to consult with clients to figure out whether you're asking the right questions, and it's possible to pursue intriguing possibilities that you'd otherwise have to drop for lack of time.

Machine learning is another essential tool for the data scientist.

According to Mike Driscoll (@dataspora), statistics is the "grammar of data science." It is crucial to "making data speak coherently."

Data science isn't just about the existence of data, or making guesses about what that data might mean; it's about testing hypotheses and making sure that the conclusions you're drawing from the data are valid.

The problem with most data analysis algorithms is that they generate a set of numbers. To understand what the numbers mean, the stories they are really telling, you need to generate a graph

Visualization is crucial to each stage of the data scientist

Visualization is also frequently the first step in analysis

Casey Reas' and Ben Fry's Processing is the state of the art, particularly if you need to create animations that show how things change over time

Making data tell its story isn't just a matter of presenting results; it involves making connections, then going back to other data sources to verify them.

Physicists have a strong mathematical background, computing skills, and come from a discipline in which survival depends on getting the most from the data. They have to think about the big picture, the big problem. When you've just spent a lot of grant money generating data, you can't just throw the data out if it isn't as clean as you'd like. You have to make it tell its story. You need some creativity for when the story the data is telling isn't what you think it's telling.

It was an agile, flexible process that built toward its goal incrementally, rather than tackling a huge mountain of data all at once.

we're entering the era of products that are built on data.

We don't yet know what those products are, but we do know that the winners will be the people, and the companies, that find those products.

They can think outside the box to come up with new ways to view the problem, or to work with very broadly defined problems: "here's a lot of data, what can you make from it?"

When I am finally able to join my data from disparate services with a unified view and the right accompanying toolset, I’ll be able to do all kinds of derivation and detection

The tension between data that is sold or bestowed and data that is found or acquired is, for now, a productive dynamic.

We’ll see open data disrupt industries and verticals ranging from air travel to journalism to religion. We’ll see new kinds of museum displays, classrooms

Data knows everything we know, everything we don’t know, and, as it turns out, even a few things we don’t know we don’t know.

Supporting or learners and staff to use collaborative digital environments and tools in safe, critical and innovative ways should be on the top of all our digital literacy wish lists and informing local and national policy and practice.

We need to be mindful that a great deal of current research highlights correlations between socio economic status and access.

But supporting all of our children and young people’s ability to have meaningful, useful and safe online interactions means that we don’t further disadvantage some of our most vulnerable populations.

It turns out what people most want to know about their friends isn't how they imagine themselves to be, but what it is they are actually getting up to and thinking about

Recent research has clearly underlined the need to address children’s and young people’s use of the internet, mobile and games technologies in the context of digital literacy.

The report points up young people’s largely pedestrian use of technology, and highlights the role that educators could and should be playing in supporting young peoples engagement as producers, creators, curators rather than primarily as consumers:

There are many definitions of digital literacy. In one of the earliest (2006), Allan Martin defined Digital Literacy as “…the awareness, attitude and ability of individuals to appropriately use digital tools and facilities to identify, access, manage, integrate, evaluate, analyse and synthesise digital resources, construct new knowledge, create media expressions, and communicate with others in the context of specific life situations, in order to enable constructive social action; and to reflect upon this process.” 

The characteristics across many of the available definitions are that digital literacy are that: it supports and helps develop traditional literacies – it isn’t about the use of technology for it’s own sake or ICT as an isolated practice it's a life long practice – developing and continuing to maintain skills in the context of continual development of technologies and practices it's about skills and competencies, and critical reflection on how these skills and competencies are applied it's about social engagement – collaboration, communication, and creation within social contexts

There is a great need for educators to be part of the process from the bottom up, not as add ons and hired guns.

ffering a way of thinking beyond the seeming naturalness or inevitability of the current state of things, challenging assumptions validated by "common sense," soaring beyond the immediate confines of one's experiences, entering into a dialogue with history and imagining a future that would not merely reproduce the present.

Giving students the opportunity to be problem posers and engage in a culture of questioning in the classroom foregrounds the crucial issue of who has control over the conditions of learning, and how specific modes of knowledge, identities and authority are constructed within particular sets of classroom relations.

Paulo strongly believed that democracy could not last without the formative culture that made it possible. Educational sites both within schools and the broader culture represented some of the most important venues through which to affirm public values, support a critical citizenry and resist those who would deny the empowering functions of teaching and learning.